In Part III of my interview with Accel partner Jim Breyer, we get into the disruptions occurring in the venture capital industry itself with the abundance of angel money and the impact that is having on traditional VC firms. In the video interview above, I ask him whether he thinks there is a Series A Crunch. “I don’t think there is,” he states, echoing what Paul Lee has argued here before. Breyer counters that venture capital is not “uniformly distributed” and there are some markets, such as Brazil, where even seed stage capital is not plentiful enough.
“It is the best time over the last decade that I can think of to be an entrepreneur,” says Breyer. “The collision of mobile and social platforms and the need to build these companies from the ground up—whether it’s a game, a healthcare application, an education application—building these from the ground up is what allows entrepreneurial activity to be unleashed. And it’s as good an opportunity from a time standpoint as I’ve ever seen.”
That said, he does concede that the competition tio win deals is “as difficult as it’s ever been” for venture capitalists. But “it’s always been intense,” he says, recalling how fast he had to jump on Facebook in 2005: “I met Mark Zuckerberg on a Monday, April 4, 2005. After a dinner the next night, Mark and I shook hands on the Facebook deal on Wednesday April 6.” Time was of the essence because “a large media company was very close to making a significant investment.” (That media company, as we now know, was the Washington Post).
Be sure to catch Parts I and II of this interview in which Breyer discusses investing in media startups and why we don’t need more IPOs.
Jim has been an investor in over thirty consumer internet, media, and technology companies that have completed public offerings or successful mergers. Many of these investments returned over 20 times their cost to investors. In April 2011, Forbes published its Midas List of top technology investors and ranked Jim Breyer #1. In August 2010, Fortune Magazine named Breyer the #1 smartest investor in technology, and one of the 10 smartest people in all of technology. Jim is currently on...
Accel Partners is a global venture capital firm with offices located in Silicon Valley, New York, London, China, and India. They typically make multi-stage investments in internet technology companies. Founded in 1983, Accel Partners has a long history of excellence and innovation in the venture capital business and is dedicated to partnering with outstanding entrepreneurs and management teams to build world-class companies. Accel today invests globally using dedicated teams and market-specific strategies for local geographies, with offices in Palo...
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